The intersecting worlds of Zellig Harris, Noam Chomsky's intellectual and political mentor. In 1995, Robert Barsky met with Noam Chomsky to discuss hiswork-in-progress, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (MIT Press, 1997). Chomsky told Barsky that he shouldfocus his attention instead on midcentury linguist and activist Zellig Harris, who was, Chomsky modestly insisted, more interesting than Cho…
Beginning with the early works of Aristotle, the interpretation of the verb "to be" runs through Western linguistic thought like Ariadne's thread. As it unravels, it becomes intertwined with philosophy, metaphysics, logic, and even with mathematics -- so much so that Bertrand Russell showed no hesitation in proclaiming that the verb "to be" was a disgrace to the human race. With the conviction …
"Leon Sterling is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering and Science at Case Western Reserve University. He is the coauthor, along with Ehud Shapiro, of The Art of Prolog.""Addressed to readers at different levels of programming expertise, The Practice of Prolog offers a departure from current books that focus on small programming examples requiring additional instruction…
This is the first extended discussion of preferred interpretation in language understanding, integrating much of the best research in linguistic pragmatics from the last two decades. When we speak, we mean more than we say. In this book Stephen C. Levinson explains some general processes that underlie presumptions in communication. This is the first extended discussion of preferred interpret…
A proposal that the concept of minimal content--a narrow, first-person, non-phenomenal concept--plays a necessary, pivotal, foundational, and unifying role in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language.In this highly original monograph, Nicholas Georgalis proposes that the concept of minimal content is fundamental both to the philosophy of mind and to the philosophy of language. He a…
This is the first experimental study of Principle B with verb phrase ellipsis and properties of the interpretation of empty pronouns in ellipsis. Among the universal principles are those known as the principles of the binding theory. These principles constrain the range of interpretations that can be assigned to sentences containing reflexives and reciprocals, pronouns, and referring express…
"This tutorial demystifies one of the most important yet poorly understood aspects of logic programming, the Warren Abstract Machine or WAM. The author's step-by-step construction of the WAM adds features in a gradual manner, clarifying the complex aspects of the design and providing the first detailed study of WAM since it was designed in 1983. Developed by David H.D. Warren, the WAM is an abs…
First published in 2002, this is a comprehensive grammatical documentation of Kham, a previously undescribed language from west-central Nepal, belonging to the Tibeto-Burman language family. The language contains a number of grammatical systems that are of immediate relevance to current work on linguistic theory, including split ergativity, a mirative system, and a rich class of derived adjecti…
"A Bradford Book."The studies in Weaving a Lexicon make a significant contribution to the growing field of lexical acquisition by considering the multidimensional way in which infants and children acquire the lexicon of their native language. They examine the many strands of knowledge and skill--including perceptual sensitivities, conceptual and semantic constraints, and communicative intent--t…
By the 13th century BC, the Syrian city of Ugarit hosted an extremely diverse range of writing practices. As well as two main scripts – alphabetic and logographic cuneiform - the site has also produced inscriptions in a wide range of scripts and languages, including Hurrian, Sumerian, Hittite, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Luwian hieroglyphs and Cypro-Minoan. This variety in script and language is ac…